New Divisions
by Kitty Ryan
Summary: What do you DO after you've saved your world? The Clayr assess damage and Sabriel sends a message. Nick, meanwhile, is finding Ellimere slightly overwhelming.
1. Prologue: The AxeGuard

**New Divisions**

K. Ryan, 2005

**Prologue**

To be the Axe-Guard of the Clayr was a most grave and solemn responsibility. For almost seven years, Erimael had stood at the heart of the glacier to perform her task, slowly ageing and defending and—so she hoped—gaining the strength of the Sword-Guard; always the best in all things.

The two women spoke seldom, but Sword-Guard, adjusting how her pommel rested against her calloused hand, shining slightly with the Charter marks carefully wrought to give warmth and keep her fingers limber, smiled at Erimael then. Just briefly. They understood each other well.

Sanar and Ryelle, golden stars, white robe and jewelled hair-nets casting a thousand tiny reflections on the cragged walls of ice all around them, could be seen walking up towards the Entrance. The last and most powerful number of the Nine Day Watch—to close a full Fifteen-Sixty-Eight for, they hoped, the last time for at least another generation. The twins' hands were entwined so fast that their knuckles had whitened; the silhouette of their clothing, always so exquisite, drawn over-tight.

But their smile was warm and lovely as they approached the Guards, as it had always been.

"I See you, Voice of the Nine Day Watch." The formal words, the formal voice, rolled easily off Erimael's tongue. "You may pass." The Sword-Guard echoed her words, the ancient, impossible brightness of her weapon flaring higher still.

Sanar and Ryelle inclined their heads. They passed. All was as it should be.

* * *

"Let us See!

"Let us _begin_!"

Wands clashed together, Charter magic a warm, glimmering presence all around, redolent with the combined Sight of the amassed Clayr. There was a triumph in this: Orannis bound and split whilst the twinned Voice awoke—yes, _awoke_; there were subtle perfections everywhere—the fragmented visions of her sisters and made them into a fluid ribbon. Made them whole.

Kirrith was to be Centre tonight, standing between Sanar and Ryelle. Not for the first time, the other two had wished that it was they who could stand in that spot, and be the conduit for all, but they were Voice still, and there was no point in argument. Besides, it was appropriate that the Clayr's Guardian of the Young should see an Old kingdom's new future.

"See!"

"**_Begin_**!"

Handclasps broke and arms were upraised. Circle after circle had the pulsating, burning Charter twine through them, directing it forward and up toward the three.

"Look." Ryelle felt her wand change to bottle, and looked Kirrith full in the face. She felt more than saw Sanar's Charter pattern at her back.

"Learn," she said.

Liquid was thrown, ice was made. Firmly, Sanar tapped the translucent pane of ice above Kirrith wish her wand, watching as it turned the familiar warm blue.

When she tapped it again, the ice cracked.

Kirrith, sister of Arielle, screamed, pushed back with some invisible force, slamming against an Observatory wall. She Saw nothing.

The ice, split into two equal parts, fell between the Voice and into the place where Kirrith had been. Sanar and Ryelle stood frozen, faces blank, wand and bottle still upraised. Below them, the Watch could do nothing. Saw nothing. Were nothing.

The left fragment shattered, and the noise it made was not that of ice. Instead, it was the dull, tearing sound of flesh being slowly dragged apart.

Sanar crumpled, suddenly bending double and falling to the ground. Blood began to leak from her nose and ears. It seeped from her clenched hands, and across her chest, the whiteness of her robe became slowly red.

And Ryelle was screaming, eyes wide; bleeding from all the places herself, her sister, but still standing, eyes open, and she spoke. She shrieked.

"_Perfection reached, the height of heights_

_Eight bare Witness, the Beginning of Sights._

_All is done, done is all_

_Now there is only space to fall. _

_What is good now will only decline_

_Blurred now will become the line_

_Insidious wars of flesh and mind_

_Bring the Others of their kind_

_Relax not, change your Role_

_Else all that's Whole shall collapse to Hole. _

_New Ages kill the complacent."_

Silence fell, and so did the Clayr. All of them, slipping to the ground until the concentric circles of women were a crushed, open flower of white petals, leaving only the children not yet Awoken bewildered and alone.

* * *

At the Entrance, Erimael was cradling the body of the Sword-Guard, lifeless in her arms before ever Seeing the young Clayr who would have become her successor.

* * *

Ryelle was the only Clayr left standing. Severed, alone, and blind. The Voice split and broken with her words. 


	2. Little Lost Acelstierrean

**New Divisions

* * *

**

The Old Kingdom:

_Nineteenth Year of the Restoration of King Touchstone I, now Torrigan._

Ancelstierre: 1930 A.W.

* * *

**Chapter One**: Little Lost Ancelstierrean

* * *

Nicholas John Andrew Sayre had died as a vassal for destructive evil and was brought back a battered mixture of Free Magic and bruising; baptized and bewildered.And almost seven months worth of time had done very little to change the situation.

He was, simply, an Ancelstierrean in Belisaere. One with a shining mark on his head that obeyed _none_ of the world's most basic physical rules, and he had a lingering and inconvenient tendency to faint every time he tried to stand up for too long.

Nick stood up then, andtoo quickly; the walls of his Blue Guestroom spinning as he gripped a chair until his head cleared. Seven months in Belisaere. His family knew he was still alive, but very little else. He just didn't know what to tell them. Somehow, he thought a brisk _Mother, Pater, Uncle Edward, you see, _here's _the thing: there's a perfectly logical reason as to why not all's been right lately, though when I say _logical_…I was compelled by a little sliver of metal that ended up in me because a necromancer fellow mistook me for Prince Sameth—old Sam, you remember, mother?—and it was imbued with his, that is to say, essence, and so I became something of an avatar…. _

No. That was _not _going to work, and his internal monologue hadn't even dared trespass near the matter of…winged disreputable dogs, albino-dwarf-cat things or owls that turned into blasted pretty women.

Hand pressed to his temples to stay off another headache, the tip of one of his fingers brushed against the…thing, on his forehead. The Charter mark. Nick could feel, suddenly, that he was connected to a myriad of different lives, all through an impossible, illegible hieroglyph that had been irrevocably welded onto him. He could feel the warmth of it; the vastness, and it frightened him. A Sayre. Blushing hotly, eyes tight shut behind his glasses, his hand balled into a fist and was jammed into his trouser pocket, which at least hadn't decided to rot away like his old clothes in the…the… _incomprehensible _atmosphere that lingered this side of the Wall.

"Be careful, Sam."

Nick shuddered, hearing the level, but slightly raised voice coming from just a length down the Palace—palace!—corridor. Nick rarely heard any noise from that room. He knew that its currant occupant left its confines even less frequently than he did. Nick also knew why he was hearing any sign of life now.

Lirael was having her hand fitted.

From what he could grasp, he knew that this was no simple procedure for her. Earlier that month, when he'd questioned Sam about the matter, he'd said something about how his magic refused to fuse with his aunt's—_aunt's_—severed wrist, because some there were still some traces of a Free Magic, 'Destroyer-attuned' presence around the young woman in general and her wound in particular. All his previous efforts had inelegantly gone to pieces before Lirael had worn the things five minutes—a painful, debilitating process for her.

The only time he'd heard her say anything other than a blank how'd you do was when Sam was prodding at her. He'd seen her speak to Sabriel—called away now—before, slowly, looking drawn and exhausted. Ellimere—who, once he could look her in the eye, very definitely did _not _match her younger brother's descriptions of '6'9 and equine'—spoke to her often, rarely expecting a reply, but besides that there was practically nothing. Not a peep. Except for murmurings that Nick could swear were directed forwards the small soapstone dog statue that never left her arms.

Another blush. Memories of winged Dogs and cheerful life-preserving Dogs left him confused, and he had no idea why he really took such an interest in the—_what_ was the term?—in the Abhorsen In Waiting's wellbeing when he couldn't look after his own.

_At least_, he thought, sitting at his Desk again and trying to avoid making direct eye-contact with a book of Charter marks Ellimere had gifted him with a week ago, _I still have both hands. And my voice.

* * *

_

"Sorry, Aunt Lirael."

Prince Sameth stood hunched over his workspace: a woman's pale arm, cut off clean where a hand should be. His fingers gently gripped the wrist as he tacked gold and wire into place with half-whispered marks.

Lirael winced, but didn't complain again, dipping her head and letting her face hide behind the dark fall of her hair.

"Head up, please." Sam filled in his young aunt's silences for her, eyes squinting up still more. "Your hair's in my way. You know, I really had no idea about ghost limbs. The idea that you can _feel_ your old hand, even after…well, I didn't think it was, you know, possible. Though I do remember hearing something like during one of my old science classes, but Nick's your manfor that—"

"—He's looking better."

"—I never really _could_ pay attention in—what was that, Lirael?"

"He's looking better. Your friend Nick."

Sam looked up briefly, surprised. "Yes he is, rather. Now, this is a difficult bit…"

Lirael shuddered as wire connected to a shimmering gold joint, part of the hand that looked just as if it was hovering in mid air by her stump. Sam didn't seem to notice.

"There." Sounding immensely satisfied, Sam let himself draw away from his work, smiling. "That'll hold fast."

A muffled, inelegant snort from Lirael. "Till the end of the week, perhaps?"

"Did you just laugh?"

She tensed up, head dipping lower, only half knowing why. Silence. Lirael had been wishing deep and hard for silence and a bare second on her own. Time to think, and remember. What else was there? Fingers that were nothing more than memory curled up into a fist, causing Sam's delicate workings to shift treacherously. Swallowing, she tried to calm herself.

"Aunt…Aunt Lirael?"

"Sam?"

"You're…we…er…worry."

With her whole hand, Lirael pushed back her hair, revealing her face. _I have a family_, she thought, even the silent voice of her wits sounding dull. _People who care about me. And Iwish they'd go away. _Aloud—and sounding relatively normal, she hoped—all she said was: "I only talk when there's something to talk about."

"Oh, don't say _that_ too loudly," Sam muttered. "Ellimere might take it into her head to give you lessons on the Art of Conversation. Which is," he added, grinning broadly, "rather appropriate, when you think about it."

Wrist and metal jerked as Lirael tried to bring up both hands to smother the laugh.

_Well…I hope they don't go just yet.

* * *

_

On the Upper Ratterlin, there was no one, living or dead, to notice the ice-statue by the banks.

If someone _had _been in sight, they would see that it was a figure of a woman in early middle age, her pale, still face beginning to show the lines and shadows of long-usage, her bobbed hair just on the point of thinning and fading. They would have noticed the determinedset of her mouth, and then, undoubtedly, the unsheathed sword in her hand.

By the time they had taken in the bandolier of bells she wore, they would know that this figure wasn't a statue at all.

Besides, stonework didn't usually open its eyes and stand up—jerky, shaking; shedding ice—forced back into Life from a horror of the First Precinct. Come to that, neither did most seasoned Abhorsens.

Sabriel had found Sanar in Death.


	3. Halflings

**New Divisions**

**Chapter Two: **Halflings

* * *

The Sword-Guard was warm, her body relaxed as she was half propped up and draped over Erimael's knees. Her greying hair, braided back harshly from her lined, narrow face, was gleaming softly. Pink on the cheeks; fullness in the wide mouth. Even a smile.

She had heat, she yielded, and she was dead. A death Unseen.

There was no space in the crypts waiting for the Sword-Guard. Nothing prepared. There were of the careful plans; no sign in her bearing of a new weight and gently grieving solemnity. No apprentice from the Rangers into whom she would pour all of her ancient responsibility. She had left the Clayr with one half of a whole. Half-protected, half right and half alive; Erimael with her.

Slowly, eyes open and clear, Erimael bent her head and kissed her fallen sentry—something she had never dared do in life.

And then, of course, she stood, and took the sword from the body. It was heavy and awkward; a drag on her left side, but there was nothing else she could do.

The Axe-Guard could not leave her post. It was forbidden.

* * *

Decades of seeing every possible mix of the fantastical, improbable and the downright unlikely had given the fifty-second Abhorsen a clear idea of what was actually _impossible_, and what she had just witnessed was very much that.

It was a truism in the grossest sense to say that Sabriel knew death. That she knew, most intimately, those who had entered into it. There was a small white rabbit; whole platoons at the Wall. Her father—always Abhorsen to her, never Terciel—and a Magestrix; faces behind the names on Wyverley's obelisk. Death as a process, as an end, was both normal and inevitable. Sabriel knew that, over time, she would see those she loved cross into the First Precinct and beyond; she would deal with the pain of it in her own way, forcing herself to turn away from the darker instincts of a Necromancer: she was too responsible now to do to humans what she had done as a child to Jacinthe's Bunny. What she had just been forced back into Life by, however, had disturbed her to her core.

Only Abhorsen's were allowed to linger at the border, not unlike how only authorized personnel could traverse the Ancelstierre Wall. There was no sign, nothing that read:

PERIMETER COMMAND

THE CHARTER

Unauthorised egress from the Border Zone

Is strictly forbidden.

Anyone attempting to cross the Border

Zone will be bound/slain/Walked without warning.

Authorized travellers must have the Bells/SwordBloodline

On arrival.

REMEMBER—NO WARNING WILL BE MADE

But still, it was a known thing. To see—somehow, despite _everything_—Sanar, ankle deep in the Precinct, her face full of the clean blankness of the Dead and yet somehow unmoving, anchored by an invisible tie to the 'perimeter', was a strange and terrifying thing.

Finally catching her breath, the woman sat still, knees drown up to her chest and arms wrapped around her knees, and thought. It took a long time before she could stifle the panicked urge to simply draw Mosrael and wake the Waker.

_But I mustn't_, she thought. _I could…but I mustn't. _

Most twins were two souls born once. Sanar and Ryelle…they were one soul born twice. They were one. To separate them would kill them.

"Both of them!" Sabriel muttered to the empty air. "But…if Ryelle isn't with Sanar…?"

It was nonsensical. The Abhorsen could intuitively grasp that it was probably the still-living Ryelle that was keeping the other Clayr where she was, but it was still almost an abomination, and an incomprehensible one at that.

Sighing, Sabriel, the fifty-third Abhorsen of the Old Kingdom, slipped quietly back into Death, drawing mahogany-handled Dyrium before her hand filmed over with ice.

* * *

Torn. Ripped. Deformed. Maimed. Violated.

Deformed.

Separated.

The Clayr Ryelle came to her senses slowly and painfully, and then wished that she could lose them again. She had fallen across her sister, both bodies were stained with rusting smears of blood and sweat—one's warm, the other's clammy and cold against her skin. Except, now that body was not her sister. It was just a lumpen thing, pale with staring eyes; empty and alien.

Ryelle, for the first time in her life, was alone and— raggedly at first, but soon with more power—she screamed.

* * *

Kirrith heard the screaming. It was faint, sealed off in a part of her mind she felt she no longer had access to. Why was she on the floor? Why…why was there blood in her mouth and—trembling, the older woman reached up to her face with disbelieving fingers—was that _blood _gluing her eyes shut? The pain she felt trying to sit up shocked her, so Kirrith decided not to try it again. This was…a dream. Connected to the horrible fragments that cut her mind when…when _what_? Kirrith couldn't remember.

"Is…anybody there?" she whispered, tongue a thick stranger in her mouth. "…Hello?"

Dyrium's sweet and pretty voice echoed off the waters, the gleeful, laughing notes entwining themselves around the greying, slight body standing in their path. Sabriel watched as her lips parted, hesitant and yet compelled.

Sabriel's own mouth formed the expected demand. "Speak."

"Yes."

The Abhorsen couldn't help it. She flinched as she heard Sanar speak in the heavy, leaden tones of the Dead. Moderate and nothing else but level; free of inflection. Still, she wouldn't run again.

"You are Sanar?"

"Yes."

"You are… tied to life?"

"I am Between. It frightens me. I am alone."

"Alone?"

"Alone. Until you Choose."

The words of prophecy always had capital letters. "Choose _what_, Sanar?"

"I cannot See. I cannot tell."

"Will you stay here?"

"Not for long. Ryelle will not be able to bear it. I know this, even though can no longer…I am frightened, Abhorsen."

All this, in the dread lifeless monotone. "Why are you here? You can tell me?"

"Sacrifice."

* * *

By the time the screaming had worn away to a hiss, Kirrith had managed to struggle into a sitting position. Her head was ringing, and her eyes still refused to open, but she was up. "_Is anybody there_?"

She could here movement from where she knew the lower ranks of the Clayr had been. Slow, agonized movement.

"Kir-rith?"

"Who's…who's that?"

"Ann…it's Annisele. I…it's all dark."

Little Annisele. "Are you hurt, ch—"

"I don't know what's _going on_." The young Clayr's voice was growing stronger, sounding more like the pretty little thing who had left the Halls of the Youth almost five years before. "I think Imshi's dead."

"She is."

Kirrith started, gasping as her body complained. "Vancelle?"

"Yes. I managed to get my eyes open. I can see you, Kirrith."

A choked sob. "You're…sure?"

"I'm sure. Imshi, and Ness."

"Kirrith! Kirrith!" Annisele, out of all of them, had managed to stagger to her feet, eyes still shut tight. "I can stand."

"Sit _down_, child." Kirrith flinched as she heard the Chief Librarian's ragged shout. "We all just need to…stay here until we've all come back to ourselves. Understand?"

"Yes, Vancelle."

"Good girl. Kirrith?"

"Vancelle?"

"I can see Ryelle. I think Sanar…I think she's dead. Do you remember anything of what happened? You were at the centre."

"I…I just…" tears slowly began to leak through the woman's eyelids. "I just don't know."

Vancelle, though no one could see it, managed a shrug. "Not to worry, I suppose. Nothing we can do about it for the moment." Fists clenched, she raised her voice, trying to pitch it so that it would echo around the desolate cavern."

"Is there anybody else alive in here?"

* * *

Sabriel stared; face almost as blank as Sanar's. "Sacrifice?"

"No one remembers the sacrifice. Before, it was the Eighth. Now, it is Four. But this is greater than before, and thus repercussions will also be greater."

"I don't understand." Dyrium twitched in Sabriel's hand, trying to sound.

"You must look back, unless you want to end this and Walk me where Ryelle must follow. Ends, at least, are definite. Otherwise, just look back. I can give nothing more. Go now. Cousin."

Heart heavy with foreboding, Sabriel did as she was bid, leaving Sanar alone in the river.


	4. Seven Hundred Eighty Four

**Chapter Three: **Seven-Hundred-Eighty-Four

* * *

**Note:** To everyone who has reviewed, thank you for your patience, and the plot should become more apparent soon. Things _will _draw together. Also, I haven't read the latest Nix Novella, on account of being entirely unable to find it, so forgive me if this fic turns AU without my knowledge.

* * *

It took hours for blue-and-green eyes to open. They were glued together from blood that came from no wound, dried hard and fast. Pale lashes stuck to the tops of cheeks.

By the time vision returned, the only things seen were bodies of Clayr.

A full half of them lay dead.

* * *

"Something must be done."

Kirrith looked up at steel-voiced Vancelle with almost childish awe. Still shivering and swaying on her feet, Nine Day Watch headdress hopelessly askew and somehow hooked around her ear, the middle-aged woman felt battered and pathetic. The Head Librarian, surveying the broken-flower-pattern of fallen figures, showed no such weakness, even if one square hand did rest gently on Ness' shoulder.

Over everything, within everything, there was Ryelle. Her screams had died away in time, but the noise of the woman was incessant, clinging like fog and dripping into the blank space of Kirrith's mind. She gibbered.

Vancelle drew herself up, apparently unhearing, unfeeling. "All who can walk, come with me," she said, and Kirrith was one of those who found themselves trailing in her wake as the woman left the cavern, looking up in silence as cold sunlight touched her face.

There were gasps as the Clayr discovered the Axe-Guard.

"You, too? Oh, Erimael…."

Annisele stepped forward. She was the only one among them who had tears in her eyes. They ran down her face, tinged pale red. She had known Erimael before she had been made Guard. They were nearly the same age.

Erimael stood unblinking, the beautiful sword unwieldy in her leather-guarded hand. Her voice, when she spoke, had lost all traces of hard-learned ritual. "Who Saw this?" she whispered.

Vancelle's rough 'no one' made them all shudder, Annisele reaching out a hand to brush Erimael's arm.

The sentry hissed, flinching back.

"_Enough_."

Ryelle was still audible, gasping and chittering behind them, echoing off glacial walls.

"Now is not the time," Vancelle managed to speak easily over this chorus, chin jutting, "for grief. For hysterics. For _imagination_. If we are alive, then I doubt we have the luxury of seeking out the reasons for it. We need to _function_, first."

The narrow space of the Entrance was crowded with people who felt endless empty space all around them, and they stared at the Librarian almost as a single, entranced being. "Those of you who are fit enough will head back to their tasks, or help those of us who cannot move to the infirmary. Kirrith?"

Kirrith started, eyes huge. "Van-Vancelle?"

"The children."

"The…the children." All Kirrith could do was mouth the words stupidly. "The _children_."

"They might," here, Vancelle swallowed. "They might still live."

The Guardian of the Young hitched up her stained skirts, staggering and stumbling as she headed towards the Halls, leaving the dead behind.

* * *

There were several enclosed gardens within Belisaere palace, and in the one Nick took a turn in every other morning he invariably saw Lirael though one of the arched, lead-embellished windows. Lirael, drawing back curtains and then suddenly closing them again. Lirael sitting at a desk. Lirael staring at nothing. Lirael pacing. Lirael, staring at a new hand that was always in some state of general disrepair; Lirael brushing her straight hair back from her face with the other one.

Nick had taken to waving at her; the day before yesterday, she had waved back.

It had been a curiously mechanical gesture even when given by living joints and she had looked distinctly uncomfortable—there had _certainly _been no waving on her part the following day, begod—but it had been a strange and pleasant surprise all the same. Sam had taken him aside a week back and told him, rather sheepishly, Nick thought, that his aunt was avoiding all contact with the Ancelstierrean because his Free Magic taint was simply too much for the tenuous links of her golden hand. It made him feel like a leper.

If the woman was prepared to make eye contact and raise a hand now and then, she mustn't be taking things too personally. It was a definite relief. Looking up, Nick could see that Lirael's back was to the window. Did she _ever _leave the room? Grinning bemusedly, he waved, knowing it would be unseen.

"And good morning to you, too!"

Nick felt that he had jumped about a foot before turning to face the owner of the unmistakable, mellifluous voice, currently full of hearty-undertones.

Ellimere, daughter and heir apparent to King Torrigan and regent before his return seven months previous, was smiling brilliantly at him, her brown curls unbound and shining down her back. Recovering quickly—Nick had grown used to this woman's mystifying ability to pop out of nowhere over their lengthening acquaintance, just as he'd almost become accustomed to the stern-faced guards that even now were standing in her shadow—he smiled in return.

The royal chuckled. "You're improving, Master Sayre. Sam is still being an abominable host and leaving you to your own devices, I see."

"Appalling as usual," said Nick, very dry. "Aren't you supposed to be holding court this morning?" He had been instructed in the most firm terms to call Ellimere by her first name months ago now, an embarrassment he usually escaped by avoiding any form of address at all costs.

"Father's in," she said simply. "I intend to go riding. How are you as a horseman, Nick? I know you learnt at Somersby."

"The dodgy end of passable, I'm afraid," he demurred. "I mean, I know which end is which, but I've always been more keen on horse _power_ if you—"

"—That will _not _do." Ellimere's eyes flashed and she gave a full-blooded grin, tossing back her head. Nick blushed.

"Oh dear, I've embarrassed you." Ellimere's colour faded a little, and she looked genuinely contrite.

Nick, who's own rosy tinge had more to do with his sudden glimpse of the strong, graceful arch of her throat than any belittling of his equestrian prowess, made a series of strangled noises. "Really…s'nothing. Nothing at all."

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, Nicholas. Of _course _there's less of a chance to ride in Ancelstierre." A look of simply radiant purpose filled her face, and she clapped him hard on the shoulder. "I'll teach you, and that's all there is to it." Another head toss, hair flying back from her face. Nick had never seen it undressed before. The whole effect was quite mesmerising.

"Really, m'…Ellimere. There's no need."

"But there _is_." The woman was impassioned. "Don't you see? You just can't be expected to wilt away here until your taint wears off with nothing to do."

"I…but I-I read!" Triumphant, Nick tilted his head to the side. Ellimere was an inch taller than he was. "The Charter books you gave me…my _word _they're fascinating stuff, and—"

"—You haven't read a word, I know," she replied calmly. "It's completely understandable. But riding has nothing to do with the Charter. It's irrelevant. Besides," here was the third smile of the morning, slow and sincere. "I'm not going to bite you."

Somehow, under the weight of it all, Nick felt himself giving in. "Lead on," he said, bowing with a flourish.

"Oh, good."

* * *

From her window, Lirael, who had turned around, watched the two of them go, slowly lifting a hand to wave. As she managed to open shutters to let the warmth in, she could hear Nick's voice floating up and back to her.

"You really are an extremely intimidating woman."

The Abhorsen-in-Waiting was just about to close the shutters again when Prince Sameth burst in through the door, wild eyed and distraught.

* * *

Sabriel, landing the blue-and-silver Paperwing on the Clayr's glacier, was not surprised when there was not a single soul out to meet her. She had felt the dead from a mile away, vast in number, and by the time she had touched down the Abhorsen felt as if there was no chance for life at all, except for the barest flickerings of it she felt beneath the walls of ice. Word, she hoped, would reach Belisaere soon.

Shivering, breath hanging in the air inches from her face, Sabriel trudged on and down, not bothering to close the hangar door.

* * *

Miraculously, Kirrith still had her keys to the Halls of Youth, and they slipped as easily into the oiled lock as ever, as if nothing had even happened.

This illusion was shattered, however, when waist-high little bodies surged forward and clutched at her, their legs entwining with hers and almost dragging her down to the cold floor. Older children hung around the edges, reaching out wondering hands, shying back at the blood.

"Kirrith, Kirrith, _Kirrith_."

The fidgety Guardian was rarely touched and never hugged, but these frightened mites in blue tunics were making up for it now, clinging and whimpering. "What's _happening_?"

* * *

Vancelle had re-entered the cavern; someone needed to name the dead. Walking slowly, reaching down to touch each of them gently on the forehead with one large finger, the sound of her footsteps was accompanied by a constant stream from Ryelle; she was the Clayr Vancelle reached last.

"What _are _we going to do with you," she murmured, voice betraying her pain at last. "Nothing Seen; no crypts for anyone…." The woman bent over Sanar's unmistakably dead form, reaching under her to lift the Voice—a body, now—so that at least she wouldn't be lying in what looked like a pool of her own semi-frozen blood.

That was before a familiar, anguished voice rang out, echoing in the enclosed space. "Do _not _touch that woman!"


End file.
